The first time I saw Steve Jobs in person, I was jealous.

It was 1990. I was at Cornell, and Steve came to the Computer Science Department to convince the school to buy his NeXT computers. 

They were these perfect black cubes, the most beautiful machines I'd ever seen. I would later write a chess program on one of them.

But nobody was looking at the computers that day. Everyone was looking at Steve. We all crowded around him just to study him up close, like he was a rock star who had wandered into the wrong building.

He was young. He was rich. He had charisma. I was a kid who didn't know what he was going to do with his life, and here was a guy who had already changed the world once and was trying to do it again.

I wanted to be him. I didn't know how. I still don't.

What I did instead, over the next thirty-something years, was buy almost everything he ever helped make.

The laptop. The phone. The watch. The headphones I lose every three weeks. If the Apple Store sold beds, I'd be sleeping on one right now.

So when Ron Johnson came on my podcast this week, I was a little starstruck.

Ron built the Apple Store. The Genius Bar. The whole thing. 

Before that he ran merchandising at Target, where he hired Michael Graves to design teakettles and toasters, and suddenly a discount store had taste. Steve Jobs noticed. He asked to meet "the guy doing all the design work at Target."

Ron's new book is Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple's Genius. In it, he writes that one reason Steve hired him was that he was kind.

Kind. Steve Jobs. Same sentence.

I asked him about it. 

What Ron Taught Me 

Ron grew up outside Minneapolis. One winter a neighbor's husband died, and the kids shoveled her driveway before they shoveled their own. That's just what you did.

Steve spent his days with people who lived in their heads. Chips. Code. Specs. Ron lived in his heart. A retailer has to. The whole job is how a thing makes a person feel.

Here's what I learned.

1. Where you stand is your first sentence.

Steve told Ron the first thing Apple says to a customer is where it puts the store. Pick the wrong spot and every local knows instantly. They know where people park. Where they eat lunch. Where the tourists wander. You have to know the town better than the town does.

I think about this with everything now. Where you show up speaks before you do.

2. Hire from bookstores.

Old tech stores were full of guys tinkering with gadgets, avoiding eye contact. Terrifying if you were new to computers. So Apple recruited from bookstores. A good bookstore clerk asks what you've been reading and walks you to the right shelf.

That's the Genius Bar in one sentence.

3. Never hurry the customer.

Ron figured it took four or five visits before someone bought their first Mac. So he told his people: spend all the time they want. Thank them. Invite them back.

I did go back. For years. I'd walk into the Fifth Avenue store with nothing to buy and walk out smiling with an iPod, listening to music from my childhood I hadn't heard in decades.

4. Protect the sacred stuff.

Ron recently walked every home aisle at Target and compared it to what was there thirty years ago. Old Target won. Easily.

The culprit? The floors.

Target used to have white floors, polished every night. The colors bounced off them. It felt happy. About a decade ago somebody swapped them for dark gray concrete because it looked hip. Ron says that one choice drained the life out of the whole store.

Every business has a few sacred things. Institutional memory fades fast. If nobody writes down the Bible, someone paints over it.

5. Take the hit and fix it.

Apple opened its third store on a Saturday. Monday morning, Ron walked into the exec meeting. Steve looked up: "You haven't sold a computer in the state of Texas. What are you doing here?"

Ron sat down and said he'd fix it. Steve went after the work, every time, and Ron knew it. High performers love that. It makes you better.

6. Don't be in a hurry.

I asked for the best business advice he ever got. 

Five words: “Don’t be in a hurry.” 

Under Steve, Pixar made one movie a year. Two would have doubled revenue. Steve refused. Apple waited six years after the iPod to make a phone. Three more for the iPad. You earn the right to do the next thing.

Right now everyone is throwing hundreds of billions at AI, terrified of missing it. Apple sits back and watches.

Maybe that's Ron's lesson scaled up to a trillion-dollar company.

Customers don't move at the speed of business. Neither does anything worth building.

This is one of my favorite podcasts of the year. Click here to listen and see why.